Pistoia Alliance Events

We are running a range of events this quarter open to our members and partners. Space is limited at each event so please sign up early. Click to view our full list of events.

• London Dinner and Debate, 9 Feb. 2011 (17:30-22:00 GMT), Central London (near Green Park), UK. All members are welcome to join the board for a buffet dinner and debate/discussion on hosted services and cloud computing. Register to reserve your spot.
• Board Face-to-Face Meeting, 8-9 Feb. 2011, Berkeley Square, London, UK. Highlights will include keynote talks from Professor Carole Goble and Rowan Gardner. Participants will discuss the future of life sciences R&D, brainstorm over the entire Alliance portfolio, and plan the first Pistoia Alliance Conference and Members' Meeting.
• Workshop: Next Generation Sequencing, 3 March 2011, AstraZeneca (Alderley Park), Manchester, UK. Register now for the Conference.

First Annual Conference and Members' Meeting, 12 April 2011, Boston, USA.

With so many projects reaching key milestones this year, the Pistoia Alliance is pleased to announce an inaugural conference and members' meeting. Thomson Reuters has kindly agreed to host the meeting at their campus in Boston on 12 April 2011. This site is very close to the conference centre where Bio-IT World Conference and Expo will be held from 12-14 April 2011. Our meeting is scheduled to end before the Bio-IT World conference starts on 12 April.

Our intent is to provide a day-long agenda reviewing Pistoia progress and providing high-level talks on subjects of interest to Alliance members. We welcome ideas from the membership for potential additional topics. To participate in the meeting or to contribute suggestion for the planning, check out the planned agenda or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Register now for the conference.

Featured Event: Pistoia Alliance Collaborates on Data Modeling and Interoperability

The Pistoia Alliance is collaborating with the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) Network of Excellence, and Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) communities to hold a biomedical data and model interoperability workshop on 28-29 March 2011 (see Programme Outline).

Mathematical modelling communities in the domains of systems biology, bioengineering, and pharmacometrics represent an active and diverse network of biomedical scientists that studies human biology by computational means. This diversity is the basis for an impressive breadth of modelling and simulation approaches that generate large volumes of potentially shareable data and model resources (DMRs). Although, in principle, such resources are re-usable by the discovery, development and healthcare communities, in practice few can currently be shared due to a number of obstacles:

• Concerns about clinical data confidentiality
• Limitations due to model intellectual property
• The lack of consistent annotation protocols for biological concepts that are implicitly represented in both clinical and pre-clinical DMRs
• The absence of open and coherent technical infrastructures that allow community users to apply annotation in a consistent manner using standard terminologies/ontologies and subsequently query and reason logically over these distributed annotated repositories

The VPH's RICORDO (started Feb 2010) and the IMI's Disease/Drug Modeling Resource (commencing early in 2011) aim to develop protocols and computational infrastructures to support semantic interoperability of biomedical DMRs. The two projects have a number of operational goals in common, specifically:

1. Building a communal standard set of ontologies for representing biological structure across different scales (i.e. small molecules to gross anatomy); biological qualities observed in the lab or clinic (e.g. pressure, mass, concentration, etc.); and units of measurement
2. Assisting and educating the community in targeted ontology development and semantic interoperability
3. Developing tools that make use of the above ontolgies to annotate VPH and IMI data and models applying automated ontology-based reasoning methods on DMR annotations to identify novel relationships between existing resources
4. Deploying infrastructure in support of sharing and querying annotations, as well as providing the basis for automated analysis and modeling workflows

At the workshop in March, participants will identify practical causes of and solutions to semantic interoperability obstacles. In particular, we aim to work with modelers, knowledge managers, and data stewards from the EFPIA partners in the Disease/Drug Modeling Resource (i.e. AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly, Merck, Novartis, NovoNordisk, Pfizer, Hoffmann-LaRoche, Servier, and UCB) to establish the communal requirements and metadata standards for the efficient application, sharing, and querying of DMR annotations. We shall also present and demonstrate interoperability toolkits in current use within both industry and academic communities.

This meeting is sponsored by the European Bioinformatics Institute Industry Programme and will be held at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in the UK. Registration is open now (EBI login required); for further details, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .